Sunday, June 18, 2017

June 18

Hello Everyone!

We have had a really good week this week. We did a lot of praying, and it came out with a lot of miracles! The biggest day that we saw the miracles was on Friday.

In the morning, one of the members had invited us to eat breakfast with them. This particular member is a less active, and for a job, he fishes. These last three weeks almost no one had been able to catch any fish. As in the most they would catch was 3 or 4 kilos, which is obviously not enough for all the expenses of a family. But brother was insistent, so Friday morning we went down to the river where they dock their boat. When we got there, it turned out that they had caught over 200 kilos of fish!! But the weird thing was, they were the only ones who had caught anything. They were very kind about it though. They gave some fish away to some of the other fishermen who hadn't been able to catch anything, and then we barbecued some fish there at the riverside. We ate lots of fish, and had a great time. I'm not sure why they were able to catch fish on that day, but I believe it was help from our Heavenly Father.

Then after that in the afternoon came the second miracle. As we were planning for the day, we felt that we should go visit a man that we've been teaching sometimes. So we did go and visit him, but when we got to his house, he wasn't home. So we thought for a little bit where we should go, and we decided to go to the house of a less active family that we knew was there, but still hadn't been able to teach. Well what happened is as we were walking towards their house, the children were coming home from school, and one of them walked up to us and said, "Are you guys going to visit the Areola family?" And that was the exact family that we were going to! He turned out to be their youngest son. So he walked with us to their house, and when we got there, the parents weren't home, but one of their daughters, Vanessa, was there. Vanessa hadn't actually ever been baptized. She had been taught, and gone to church multiple times, but for whatever reason, she hadn't ever been baptized. She was super receptive though. She will hopefully be baptized in the next month or two.

The third miracle was when we went to visit a different less active member. Her name is Lobell. When I first got into the area we were teaching two of Lobell's nieces, and we were sure that they were going to be baptized. They were so receptive and excited to learn and go to church, but they had moved outside of our mission boundaries, to an area where there aren't any missionaries yet. Well what happened is that when we got to Lobell's home, she said that those two were moving back to Santa Ana! So we were able to teach them again, and hopefully their progress will continue!

There were lots more miracles, but those were the ones that really stood out to me. It was a really good week, and at the end of the week, president Andrada came and attended church with us here in Santa Ana. It was really good to have him here. He gave a talk in sacrament meeting that was perfect for the members, and then he gave a training to all of the auxiliary leaders after the church services that was really good. Hopefully they all take it to heart and apply it in their life.

One thing that I really liked from his training though was about our callings. He based it on D&C 107:99, 100. He talked about how there are only two reasons why people don't magnify their callings. The first is that they are slothful. They are too lazy to do what they are supposed to. The second is that they haven't learned their calling, and so they don't know what they should do to fulfill their calling. So us as members of God's church, need to make sure that we first know what we are supposed to do. We can find help in the church manuals, and from our leaders. Then once we know what we should do, just go out and do it! Don't be lazy. All callings come from God, and we have something to learn from it, if we do our best to do the calling.

Another thing that he said that I liked was about magnifying your calling. He said that the way to magnify your calling is to do things that aren't written in the handbook. We aren't supposed to just do the bare minimum. God wants us to find ways to help those under our responsibility, and when we do that, that is when we will really see the miracles happening in our lives. I know that that is true because I have seen it in my mission. When I try to just get by on the littlest amount of work that I can do, we seem to run into barrier after barrier, but when I try and do more, do everything I can, everything just seems to work out perfectly.

Thanks for all the prayers and support, I hope you have another wonderful week!